City book encourages builders to avoid "box-like" structures

Picture Wal-Mart at the south end of Carson City with its endless, nearly bare front wall fronted by a vast sea of asphalt.

Then take a look at Longs Drugs, Rite-Aid and Walgreens. Tree islands bring relief to those parking lots.

Rite-Aid has blue-framed, diamond-shaped windows. Longs has the gabled roof over the entrance and the sloped shed roof that wraps from the front to the side of the building.

"It's a four-sided building, not a one-sided building," said Tom Metcalf, whose firm built Longs. The visual design does not stop with the front facade.

These late 1990s structures meet the spirit of City Hall's present efforts to establish comprehensive development standards - the do's and don'ts encourage quality design of office, commercial, public, apartment and institutional projects.

"These developments kind of have what we're trying to propose with the standards," said Walt Sullivan, the city's community development director.

City departments involved in planning, building, parks, transportation, utilities and other specialities falling within the development services umbrella have spent the past year and a half assembling the various standards scattered within the municipal code.

They have produced a draft version of a Development Services book, which for the first time gives developers, builders and city staff all the standards they need in one place.

The full draft should be ready by the end of the month with reviews by various city officials and the building community following in November and December. The document could appear before the Carson City Regional Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors some time in January or February, said Andy Burnham, the city's development services director.

"When the city did a visual preference survey (in 1994), people indicated they wanted to see an improvement in the quality of design," Burnham said. "This is trying to encourage good design."

Straight from the development standards book: "Variation in wall planes, roof lines and direction are encouraged to prevent monotonous appearance in buildings. Large expanse of wall, devoid of any articulation or embellishment is to be avoided. Buildings, particularly large buildings, which give the appearance of "box-like" structures are not permitted."

Said Burnham, "We don't want them to look like old barracks buildings."

Picture Wal-Mart, built in 1991, an era when the look of a building played little role in plan inspections and building permits.

"Wal-Mart would be a different project today," Burnham said. "It would be less boxy looking. There would be more landscaping and more materials in regard to style (in architecture)."

An example is the 800-space parking lot at Wal-Mart. A pair of small trees sit at the end of each row nearest the store. Otherwise, asphalt spreads uninterrupted for seven acres.

The standards now call for designing parking lots virtually as a forest. One shade tree is required for every 10 parking spaces.

At least 20 percent of a site (not counting the building) has to be covered with landscape material. Developers can't just rely on grass to meet the landscape requirement. The standard reads that turf must make up less than half of the landscaped area.

Project design standards are new in the development standards book, but those dealing with matters like storm drainage, trails and well requirements simply were collected from various city departments.

City staff and the building industry both welcome well-defined design standards.

"It has a lot of value," said Mark Palmer, an engineer at Palmer and Lauder Engineers. "If an industry comes in, they now know what level of standards they are to build to. That translates in to dollars. He has to define the costs when he comes to Carson City. (Without design standards) you're kind of guessing. You get red lines back (building department criticisms) that you need to build a sidewalk or something. Those are costs that are not anticipated."

Metcalf, a builder and president of the Builders Association of Western Nevada, said the book puts builders and city officials on the same page.

"We don't have to go to this agency for this and that agency for that," Metcalf said. "What we're preventing by doing this is having the city interpret their own rules."

Sullivan acknowledged that having no formal standards sometimes led to builders hearing conflicting messages from different city departments.

"We have one engineer who has one idea how a parking lot should be and one planner who thinks it should be another way," Sullivan said. "Code requirements won't be hidden any more. I think it's long overdue."

City building official Phil Herrington notes similar inefficiency brought on by unclear requirements.

"The city is spending a lot of time red lining that they probably don't have to only because designers don't have clear-cut standards to go by," Herrington said. "In some of the disciplines in the city, it has taken extraordinary time to review plans because we lack standards."

Herrington and Burnham stress the standards don't lock architects and builders into strict formulas. Burnham repeats the word "encourage" when describing how many of these standards will be imposed.

Sullivan said Costco is following the spirit of the standards in its parking lot treatments and visually pleasing building design.